


the hearth

by sagemb



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: F/M, Found Families, Gen, Married Life, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Slice of Life, everything in life is mutable folks, men performing emotional labor, peter parker eats unhealthy cereal, the passage of time, tony stark listens to pj harvey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 04:21:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19221484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sagemb/pseuds/sagemb
Summary: What to Do When Your Wife Is Out of the Country: A Guide by Tony Stark1) Gain partial custody of a child2) Sleep on the couch3) Have the child gain partial custody of you





	the hearth

**Author's Note:**

> Infinite thanks to Gruoch for cheering me on/talking me through the issue every time I had a meltdown about this fic and zachas for agreeing to beta this at the drop of a hat. Also to everyone else from whom I sought validation by sending them excerpts of this fic without context or warning while it was still a WIP.

One thing Tony genuinely loves doing is driving Pepper places—the office, date night restaurants, dentist appointments, _home_ —and he loves it even more because for all that she complains that he’s a crazy man and a crazy driver, he knows she trusts him wholly and unfathomably to keep her safe. This terrifies him and thrills him in equal measure.

Sometimes she’ll say, "I can drive, you know. Better than you, Mr. Formula One," and he’ll reply, "Well, I'm kinda tired, do you want me to pull over so we can switch places?" And she'll wave a hand like the question is airy and inconsequential, not worth considering.

Now, though, his driving is steady, car going just barely five miles above the speed limit.

“You’re cute,” Pepper says. “Are you scared?”

“No,” he says, because he’s a forty-eight-year-old man and separation anxiety is for small children and dogs. “I’m just… savoring the moment. Making it last.”

“Ten days isn’t long,” Pepper says. “Remember three years ago? Four months in Brussels?”

“Four goddamn months,” Tony mutters. “I think SI should make business trips obsolete. VR conferencing, come on. We’ve got the tech. Let’s make it happen.”

“Tony, we will be fine,” she says. “Is this because we haven’t traveled separately since we got married? Is that why you’re so nervous?”

“Don’t therapize me.”

“Honey, I love you. A wedding doesn’t change a thing. Putting space between us from time to time is a good thing. We will be _fine.”_

“This sucks.”

“Tony.” Her hand settles on his right knee and stays there. “Can you believe that this is what you worry about now? Not—not negotiations with the UN and aliens invading the planet? It’s a good thing.”

“I know. My God, I know, Pep.” He’s real lucky to have this kind of life, the kind that only other people, simpler people, are lucky enough to have. “But could you imagine? Me not complaining about something? Come on, impossible.”

They laugh. God, he is so so lucky.

When he finally pulls up at the side of the airstrip and cuts the ignition, she leans across the console to kiss him firmly once, then twice: this one deeper and longer so they can both savor it.

Tony pulls back to say, "I'll get your luggage."

He walks Pepper across the tarmac towards the stewardesses who are waiting to escort her onto the plane, his free hand in hers, and tries not to think _what if I never see her again_ or _what if the plane crashes_ or _what if someone nukes Shanghai_ or _what if she comes back and I have a terminal cancer diagnosis_ or a thousand other generally terrible things.

At the base of the stairs, he turns to her. "Don't forget to call. Whenever you want. Unless I'm asleep, in which case I probably won't pick up."

Pepper cups his cheek. "I know what a time difference is, honey."

"I'll miss you."

"I know." She takes her luggage from him. "I'll miss you too."

He kisses her again, quickly, then says, "Giterdun, Potts. Close that deal, come home safe."

"Be good for the kid," she says. "I love you."

"Who do you think is gonna be taking care of who? I got this."

"I know what you two are like around each other. I've left him very specific instructions."

Tony smiles and kisses her one last time. "I love you. Have a good time."

He watches her ascend the stairs and disappear into the cabin, then goes back to his car and watches the jet take off from there.

 

* * *

 

That night, he can't sleep. By the time one-thirty rolls around, he deems it a lost cause and rolls out of bed to get some work done.

He goes to the living room and starts looking at 5G network infrastructure options while sprawled on the couch with his tablet. Some time later, he wakes up with his right arm completely numb. Sunlight is streaming through the windows.

 _I’m growing old,_ he thinks, running a hand through thinning hair. He makes breakfast alone, and he’s all right with that in the moment, but the house gets lonelier throughout the day.

 

* * *

 

Two days later, May Parker leaves for a five-day conference in Boston and Peter comes to stay with Tony, as discussed.

 _Same curfew time on weeknights. No pulling him out of school. Make sure he doesn’t get himself killed,_ May’s goodbye text reads.

 _Have a good time,_ Tony replies. _I downloaded Tinder on your phone._

 _You WHAT,_ is the next text he gets. _I am on a WORK TRIP not a VACATION Tony. I’m telling your wife._

 _Pepper thought it was a good idea,_ he says, which is not technically true. Her real words were something like, “She deserves to have some fun, but if she yells at you, you probably deserve it.”

_I swear since you two got married all you want to do is matchmake other people. First Happy and now me._

_We’re not matchmaking. I’m just saying that there’s nothing wrong with having a good time for a night or two._

_I don’t need dating apps to have a good time._

_Whooooo whee mama,_ Tony says, and then sends three fire emojis in a row. May doesn’t respond.

 

* * *

 

Tony knows Peter's heading towards the car when the stereo cuts out in the middle of _Sheela Na Gig_ and starts playing Radiohead.

"For God's sake, stop hijacking my Bluetooth!" he yells out his open window.

"For God's sake, stop idling in the fire lane!" Peter yells back. A second later, the passenger door opens and Peter drops into the seat, thunking his backpack down in the footwell. "The security guard's gonna yell at us again."

"Yeah, yeah," Tony says, already speeding out of Midtown Tech’s parking lot. "Anything to avoid the minivan caravan in the pickup lane."

"Upper middle class families drive SUVs, not minivans."

"For what? This is Forest Hills; no one's going off-roading. Especially not with their kids in the back." Tony snorts, then gestures to the display panel on the dashboard. A reedy voice croons through the speakers. "I know Thom Yorke, by the way."

"What the hell! Can I meet him?"

"No."

"Wow,” Peter remarks. “We're really getting along today.”

"It's gonna be a fun week," Tony agrees.

 

* * *

 

A little bit after Tony proposed to Pepper, they bought a high-rise building on Fifth Avenue and moved into the penthouse. They rent the rest of the apartments out to low-income tenants and broke grad students. Pepper calls it The Hearth, and it is New York’s best-kept secret.

(Aside from Spider-Man’s identity, of course.)

“Mr. Stark, can we get burgers for—oh hi, Ollie! Hi Kate!” Peter waves at Kate from 8C and her dog, which treats Tony with extreme indifference but adores the kid. “Wow, I really missed—ouch!”

The kid trips over his untied shoelaces, then his luggage, and winds up flat on his ass with a face full of Doberman slobber. “Oh, okay, Ollie, good boy—hi, I love you—ew, stop—”

“How’s the thesis going?” Tony asks Kate.

Kate blushes. “Not bad. I’ve got most of my preliminary research done, and I’m starting to organize my notes into categories of like, similar subtopics, and like, you know…”

“That’s progress. Good for you. Let me know if you need any help, okay? I mean it.”

“Absolutely,” she says, looking embarrassed as hell. “Thank you so much, Mr. Stark.”

“No problem. You going out with Ollie? Peter, you better not roll around on that floor and then sit yourself onto my pristine couch.”

“I’ll change,” Peter says, not looking up from where he’s rubbing Ollie’s belly.

“Uh huh,” Tony says. Then, to Kate: “Teenage boys are so bad at hygiene.”

She laughs. “Yeah, I’m gonna head out. Nice seeing you, Mr. Stark.”

“You too.”

Once inside the penthouse, Peter flops down onto the antique Persian rug in the living room immediately. “I’m so tired,” he says. “You should get a dog.”

“Who would walk the dog?” asks Tony.

“I would.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I totally would!”

“Kid, you can’t even consistently show up to Decathlon practice.”

“A dog is different!” Peter protests. “A dog is a living thing!”

“Which means that you could kill it.”

“A cat, then.”

“Rhodey’s allergic.”

“Damn. That sucks.”

“Yeah, whatever. Get your filthy body off my carpet. Who needs an animal in the house when there’s you?”

After the kid dicks around for a bit and unpacks a bit and does his homework and then dicks around some more, he walks up to Tony and says, “Dude. Food.”

Tony looks up from the email he’s typing, appalled. “‘ _Dude, food_ ’? That’s how you ask me to feed you?”

“No, dude.” Peter points in the direction of the kitchen. “I made us burgers. With Swiss cheese and avocado and stuff. You had wagyu beef patties in your fridge.”

“Oh dude,” says Tony. “That’s very nice of you. Thanks.”

“No problem,” Peter says. “Pepper asked me to make sure you eat and sleep. And drink more water than coffee. Do you need anything else? Because I’m gonna Spider-Man for a bit.”

“I’m the adult,” Tony protests.

“Yeah, and your wife asked me to babysit you. What kind of marriage do you guys have?”

“One where we’re both independent people who are mutually supportive of one another. How long are you gonna be out?”

“Until like, ten? Ten thirty?”

“Make it ten. Be safe.”

 

* * *

 

“The kid says you assigned him to be my babysitter,” Tony says in bed that night, when Pepper picks up the phone.

“Those weren’t the words I used,” Pepper responds. “I just made him aware of the fact that if someone else is around to stick to normal human routines of eating and sleeping, you tend to follow their schedule.”

“But May put me in charge of _him.”_

“Yes,” Pepper says serenely. “And you’ll be great at taking care of him if he’s there to remind you that your ability to remember to eat three meals a day ensures the survival of not just yourself, but another person as well.”

“But if I’m in charge of him and he’s in charge of me, who’s the real boss?”

“Friday. Obviously.”

“Oh, wow, you’re right,” Tony says.

“I know.”

“How’s Shanghai?”

“Oh, you know,” Pepper says, and he gets in bed to hear her talk, smiling down at the silk duvet cover at the smooth rise and fall of her voice.

 

* * *

 

“Pepper says that your job of keeping me alive is only so I can be better at keeping you alive,” Tony informs Peter in the morning.

“Mutually-assured survival,” says Peter through a mouthful of Reese’s Puffs. “Makes sense. That’s smart of her.”

“But it’s still my house. And you’re eating my food. So my rules.”

“You’re not the boss of me.”

Tony frowns. “Did I completely hallucinate you signing that internship contract that makes me your employer?”

“...You’re not the dad of me.”

Tony holds up a finger. Half a minute later, a single tear runs down his left cheek.

"Holy shit," Peter says. "I'll do whatever you say if you teach me how to do that."

“Just get downstairs in time,” Tony says, sniffling and wiping at his face. “I don’t want to deal with Happy’s complaints about you not being ready for school when he arrives.”

“The commute is so _long,”_ says Peter. “You should let me take an Iron Man suit.”

“Yeah, that’ll probably happen never. Don’t be late.”

 

* * *

 

When Peter comes home, he asks about the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia so dispassionately that Tony feels like punching a wall. So then he has to remind himself that this kid wasn't even born yet in 1999 and that he doesn't know it was Tony's bombs that killed Wanda's parents and stole her childhood.

"What's this for?" Tony asks after he tells Peter slowly, carefully, of what he remembers from the spring he turned thirty.

"AP Euro," responds Peter. Tony barks a laugh. "We're looking at modern Europe. And you've seen more history than me, so."

On Friday, he asks about spacetime.

"It's exactly what it sounds like," says Tony. "Three dimensions of space, one dimension of time. Add 'em up, boom. That's Einstein's whole thing." When Peter's brow is still furrowed, Tony asks, "What?"

"Dimensions are confusing," says Peter.

Tony snorts. "Are you kidding me? That's inherent in what dimensions are. We live in 3-D; we can't perceive any dimension higher than that. We only try to because we like making things harder for ourselves."

Peter grins at that. Tony gestures to Peter's notebook. "Here, pass me that. I'll explain it to you. Get ready for some abstract mathery."

"Oh boy," says Peter.

"No, pay attention, this is interesting. You'll learn this at MIT in freshman year, probably. So," Tony says, flipping to a blank page and drawing a straight line, "if you want to visualize dimensions in terms of objects, this is 1-D. And then 2-D is a square, like this, and 3-D is a cube. In 4-D it's a tesseract." Drawing this one takes a bit longer, and the tesseract turns out a bit wonky, but it's adequate for demonstrative purposes. "This isn't really 4-D, obviously; you can't represent that in three dimensions, much less in two on a piece of paper. But it's a good representation to help you get the concept. Every face of a tesseract is a cube, see."

"Oh," Peter says. "Oh, okay. That's cool."

"Yeah, it is, isn't it? My dad taught me this. When he was doing research on the Tesseract, the capital-T one."

"So what does spacetime have to do with all this?"

"Eh, it’s basically how our brains best comprehend four dimensions. You wanna know how to deal with a 14-dimensional object? Just picture a 3-D cube and say 'fourteen' really loudly. That's how everyone does it."

 

* * *

 

That night the kid comes home with a tear in the suit and a three-inch-long gash in his side. It's bleeding sluggishly through a layer of webbing, and the stiff way Peter's walking is enough to make Tony curse and dig out the first aid kit from the pantry.

"Karen, medical report to Friday," he commands. "Fri?"

"Stab wound, boss. Laceration in right external oblique, 4% healed already. Stitches and topical antibiotics recommended, but no further medical action should be necessary."

"Got it. Shit, this kit's out of gauze," Tony says, zipping it shut. "I'll be right back. Suit off, on the stool, now."

He heads for the master bathroom, which is where he keeps another first aid kit, although recently it hasn't seen much use what with his infrequent (nonexistent) Iron Manning. He finds it in the second drawer down, buried under a couple tubes of toothpaste and a box of hair dye (dark brown) and an unopened pregnancy test.

At first it doesn't even register to him. Then he blinks hard and rereads the text printed on the little white box. No, he isn't seeing things. His mind goes white. This is—what is this? Has Pepper—is she—

They've talked about it once or twice, but this is. Well. This is the real thing. It exists in his life now. And it's, what? A harbinger of good things to come or another reason to sleep poorly at night?

He grabs the first aid kit and slams the drawer shut, hurrying back to Peter.

Peter's sitting hunched over in his baggy plaid boxers, looking pale and feeble despite himself, but he barely flinches when Tony snaps on some latex gloves and starts probing the wound.

"Not your first stab wound?" Tony asks.

"Nah," Peter says, lips curved in a rueful smile.

"May sewed you up?"

"Yeah."

"How pissed was she?"

"Pretty pissed."

"Nice. Okay, I'm gonna clean this out, and then I'm gonna need you to spray it with your web solvent to get the webs off before I go in and stitch it up. Cool?"

"Yeah," says Peter, and bites his lip when Tony starts wiping the wound with antiseptic.

He works in silence. The stitches turn out neat and even from steady-handed practice. When he's done, he strips off his gloves and passes a brief hand over Peter's shoulder.

"Go eat something. And drink water," he says. "Get some sugar into you—I think we have Gatorade around here somewhere. I’ll get you some painkillers too, hold on."

Peter squints. "You drink Gatorade?"

"Me? Jesus, no, I have standards." He grabs the bottle from the fridge and hands it to Peter.

"Pepper?"

"She's got standards too."

"Oh, okay. So I'm—I've got no standards. Okay."

"Drink up," Tony tells him. "You need the electrolytes. And then go to bed."

"All right, Dad," Peter mumbles sarcastically, and Tony can't breathe for a second.

 

* * *

 

Needless to say, when he gets in bed that night, sleep doesn’t come. He needs to discuss the pregnancy tests with Pepper, he knows. His gaze falls on the couples therapy textbook sitting on her nightstand. But it’s late and he’s tired and he doesn’t know what he even wants, much less how he’s supposed to talk about it.

 _Tomorrow,_ he decides. Tomorrow he’ll ask her what it all means—why she hasn’t told him, whether she’s scared, whether she’s scared for the same reasons as him, whether those reasons are enough to change her mind.

He lies down. Presses his head against the pillow, carefully letting go of a weight. Draws the duvet up over his head like a little kid; looks unseeingly down at his curled-up body; tosses it off of himself when the air he’s trapped in with grows too thick. He closes his eyes for a little bit, just to rest them. They get tired even when he doesn’t.

Next thing he knows, there’s light coming through the curtains. Night has been going on without him. He might have slept; he might not have. It must be time to reenter the world already.

 

* * *

 

It’s morning and it’s a weekend. Tony’s been fussing on his tablet for a while when Peter stumbles into the kitchen in his pajamas.

“Morning,” Tony says. “How’s your stab wound?”

“Still hurts like hell,” Peter croaks. He pours himself a glass of water and spots the paper bag on the counter. “But I just took a dose of the rhino-strength painkillers, so that’s gonna kick in soon. Also I redid the bandages and it looks a lot less deep than it was. Oh, bagels, nice.”

“Yeah, grab whatever you want. And come over here, I wanna show you something.”

It isn’t long before Peter drops onto the couch with Tony.

“Wassup?” he asks through a mouthful of egg-everything bagel.

"I looked over the Baby Monitor Protocol footage from last night. Even past the fact that the guy didn't stab you with a knife so much as a goddamn machete, you could have gotten out of this one."

"If I could've, I would've," Peter says tiredly. "It's not like I like getting stabbed with a dude who just walks around with a machete."

"I'm gonna give you some real armor on your suit from now own. I've got some tricks up my sleeve," says Tony. "But even so. You gotta take the offensive sometimes. I'm watching this and you don't engage until after he starts waving the machete. You _waited,_ Peter. Your webs are a mid-range weapon and they don't even hurt; you definitely could have just—"

"Yoinked it out of his hand and webbed him up?"

"Exactly. I know you can read the signs."

"It's just—" Peter grimaces. "I just thought we could have..."

"Diffused the situation?"

"I thought I could have gotten him to stop. I knew he was on edge. I was gonna get close and talk him down."

"Kid," Tony says, sighing. "Sometimes you gotta play the bad cop."

"I know." He sounds miserable, and not just because his torso's got a massive hole in it. "I know I should have. I didn't wanna have to."

"Why?"

"Because... because there's a difference." Peter's getting a slightly dazed look, which is how Tony knows the painkillers are kicking in, but he keeps talking. "Being Spider-Man isn't like being an Avenger. I’ve seen enough HUD footage and assisted enough ops to know the difference. You guys deal with gods and aliens and people who really, really want to hurt humanity on a huge scale. I'm just trying to keep crime rates down here and make sure people get home safe. I know that sometimes subduing a threat means killing them. But I didn't need to, with that guy. He was wearing sneakers and a work uniform. If I punched him hard enough, he wouldn't wake up to make it to another shift." He stuffs another huge hunk of bagel in his mouth and slumps into the couch.

 _It's a Saturday morning,_ Tony thinks. _Why am I doing this to him? He's a teenager and he’s got enough trouble sleeping._

What he says is, "I know. You're a good kid. But when you’re out there, you gotta protect yourself above all else, if only to avoid May chewing the crap out of me for encouraging you to risk your life."

“I will,” Peter promises. “I’ll save you from Aunt May, don’t worry.”

"Like you could stop her. It still amazes me that she actually trusts me with you," says Tony.

"I think it's because she doesn't know how to handle me sometimes."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, it’s not like most parenting books talk about what to do when your nephew’s an enhanced vigilante. But you and me, we're both super smart regular-civilians-turned-superheroes. So, you know. She's passed the baton to you in that area."

"What area, parenting?" Tony takes a swig of coffee. "Are you _my_ kid now?"

"Yeah, I think she's banking on parental instincts being involved."

"I don't think they are," says Tony, surprising himself. But as soon as he’s said it, he knows it’s true. What he’s done to Peter is nothing a father should be doing.

"Baby Monitor Protocol? Hello?" Peter snorts. "They are, Tony."

"No." Tony sucks in his lower lip, scratching at his goatee with his teeth. "If you were my son, this wouldn't be happening."

"It wouldn't?"

"I wouldn't be telling you how to take down criminals." _I'd hire you a very well-vetted ex-Marines bodyguard and make him teach you basic self-defense and maybe a little on how to fire a gun, and in the most secure storage unit at the Avengers compound, I'd probably hide a child-sized suit of armor that is never, ever supposed to see the light of day if the world knows what's good for itself._ "I wouldn't spend weekends teaching you about opsec or tactics or half of the things they used to teach SHIELD recruits. I need you to understand that, Peter; I am not doing you a kindness."

"No, you're right. If you had a son like me, who was enhanced and had the same sense of obligation, you'd ground him. I wouldn't call that a kindness either," the kid says.

"Jesus, you're such a teenager. _Grounded ?"_

"Stop trying to misunderstand me," Peter says. "I get what you're saying. I agree. You wouldn't do to your son what you've done to me. You’d… protect him, lock him in his room if you needed to. You wouldn't groom him for a position on the Avengers." Tony doesn't know what his face is doing, but Peter takes it in knowingly. "I've been spending a quarter of my internship hours with Steve Rogers and Maria Hill lately. I'm not stupid. I'm not going to college so I can go work for Google, like Ned. But Tony—" Peter sighs. "I _am_ going to college. You showed me that my education's worth it. You’ve cared. And instead of being dead in a sewer by now, last week I took down a gang boss with what you’ve taught me. I'd call that a kindness."

"I'm really glad you're not my son," Tony says, because he realizes now. What makes the both of them want to be better around each other isn’t Peter looking for a stand-in for Ben, nor is it Tony thinking he can do better than Howard could. No, it’s a mode of understanding different than anything blood-tangled that has allowed them to come from two wholly disparate lives and arrive here, in this sunny penthouse, to sit in their pajamas and speak the same language.

"Same," says Peter. "You're overprotective enough as it is. God forbid any actual kid you have grows up to be a superhero, because I don’t think I’d like seeing what you’d do."

 

* * *

 

And Tony does call Pepper after all, sitting tucked into the corner between her nightstand and the wall. His heart is in his throat as the line rings.

Finally—“Hi, honey,” comes his wife’s voice.

“I found the pregnancy tests in the bathroom cabinet,” he says immediately. “And I know we’ve said a few things… about having kids… once or twice, but this is…”

“Realer,” Pepper finishes. “Yeah.”

“I just want to know what you’re thinking,” Tony says.

She’s silent for a long moment. “Well, you know how we’ve been a bit… lax with contraception lately?”

“Yeah,” Tony says, and it’s true. They have been, just sort of silently acknowledging what they’ve been doing, putting off the requisite conversation. Until now.

“I just thought I’d be prepared, considering. I’m not sure… what I thought it meant at the time, when I bought the tests. Just a precaution. I haven’t had any reason to use them yet. But I—” she sighs. “I wish I’d brought this up sooner. I should have said something.”

“No,” says Tony. “I feel like I’ve been avoiding any real married-people talk about this. I think—I think because I’ve been scared of accepting what I want.”

“And what is that?” asks Pepper, sounding fragile.

“I’d… really like for us to have kids,” he says. “Kid, kids, whatever. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I—and saying this fills me with an indescribable terror—really want to raise a child with you.”

There’s silence on the other end, and then wet laughter.

“Oh God, what if we fuck it up?” Pepper says breathlessly.

“Is that a—does that mean you want this too?”

“—Yes, I think so. Yes, Tony.”

“Oh God,” he says, throat tight. “We. We should talk about this more when you get back.”

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, definitely.”

“But let me just say, I’ve had all day to think about this, and I gotta say that any child who’s a mix of both me and you is bound to be the most amazing being in all of existence. Think about it. My beauty, your brains. My God. No amount of parenting mishaps could destroy a kid like that.”

“Tony, no,” his wife exclaims.

“Peter is a terrible example of my parenting, by the way. He gets himself nearly killed on a weekly basis. That’s all May and Ben. I’m more like the enabling vodka aunt than anything else. When I’m a real dad, well. You’ll see.”

“You can’t be the vodka aunt,” Pepper points out. “You’re sober.”

“I love you,” Tony says, slightly hysterical.

When they finally hang up, he finds that his hips have gotten sore from being on the floor. He stretches out his legs gingerly and hears a thud- _crash_ outside the door.

“Peter?” he calls, sticking his head out into the hallway. “You okay?”

“Huh?” Peter rounds the corner with a bowl and a mouthful of cereal. “Yeah. I got hungry. Also I just dropped my spoon. I think healing the knife wound’s taking a lot out of me.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Tony says. “You should be eating spinach and liver right now, not Reese’s Puffs. Come in here, I want to check your stitches.”

“Can I get another spoon first?”

“No. Yes. Hurry up, come on.”

Peter deposits himself at the foot of Tony’s bed, shoveling cereal into his mouth. His eyes wander around the room curiously—this must be the first time Peter’s been in his bedroom, Tony realizes.

“Lift your shirt,” Tony instructs, and carefully unwraps the bandages from Peter’s torso when he does. “Huh, not bad. Your body’s trying to push out the stitches a little bit, but that’s a good thing, I think. Means you’re healing.”

“Gross,” says Peter, still chewing.

“You’re gross. I’m gonna put some bacitracin on this and rewrap it. It’ll be gone in a week, probably.”

“Nice,” the kid says, and Tony heads to the bathroom for supplies. He catches Peter staring at Pepper’s nightstand when he comes back—more specifically, the couples therapy textbook on top of it.

“That’s just homework,” Tony says, swabbing Peter’s wound with disinfectant.

Peter’s brow furrows. "You… do couples' therapy?"

"Yeah," Tony says, and watches the kid digest this.

"Um. You guys seem happy," says Peter.

"Yeah. We are. We get each other, for the most part."

"So you're... okay?"

"Peter," Tony says, "you ever been married?"

"What? 'Course not."

"'Course not, right. Pepper and me... our marriage isn't in jeopardy. It never was. Counseling was Pepper's idea, after we got engaged—and as such it isn't a terrible one. I might even... I don't know, under heavy coercion, admit that it's a good one."

"May and Ben were really happy with each other," Peter says. "Like really happy."

"And no therapy?"

"No," Peter admits.

"Good for them," says Tony, wrapping a fresh bandage around Peter’s torso. "No, no, I mean it. But that doesn't—that doesn't rate the success of their marriage relative to mine. May's a special person, and I know your uncle must've been too. But Pepper and me—especially me, I think, but it's more of her than you'd expect—this is what it takes for us to work. We go to couples' therapy every other week and we talk and... that doesn't take away from it. It doesn't make it uglier or cheaper. It's just part of it. There's no one else that I'd be willing... that I'd love so well. I've known her for twenty years, do you understand that? That's longer than you've been alive. She's my wife."

Peter is silent for a very long moment. His face is turned away from Tony just enough so that Tony can't see his expression.

"Kid?"

"Sorry," Peter says finally. "I just... wow. I wish I had that."

"You'll get your time," Tony tells him. "Or even if you don't, there are other ways to be happy."

"What's it like?" asks Peter, sounding very young.

Tony's chest hurts a little as he tries to think of what to say. "That woman knows me like no one else does," he decides on. "And if it were anyone else, I'd be beyond mortified, but since it's her, I'm not."

Being the son of Howard Stark had taught him a lot of things: things that were corrosive and bitter in a way he’d had to thicken his skin to bear. Pepper has made him better than that. Kindness has come easier to him since knowing her. Attention to obligation, too. He’ll always be a little bit spoiled, a little bit of a pain in the ass, a little bit too afraid of dealing with his own emotions, but he has a feeling that she doesn’t shove those things out of the way when she’s looking for reasons to love him. She’s taught him that he deserves to be loved like that, which means that she deserves as much in return. Now, more than anything, what he wants is to be a good husband to her.

What still baffles Tony from time to time is how, by some standards, his parents had had a successful marriage. As in, they'd not only still _loved_ each other, they'd even tolerated being around each other. All the way up until their deaths. The fact that Howard had never really had time for family hadn't bothered Mom. If anything, she seemed to have sympathy for it. If it were anyone else, Tony would have said, "blinded by devotion" or "too eager to appease," but Jesus, this was Maria Stark, and even twenty years Howard's junior she'd been an even match for him. She wasn't a genius physicist, but when it came to people she was cleverer than him—could charm money out of pocketbooks, sympathy from jaded career generals. Tony'd gotten the company from his father but the ability to run it from his mother.

By now Tony is intimately aware that a good marriage doesn't come easy. So there must have been a lot going on between his parents that Tony as a kid hadn't even sensed on his radar. Now he isn't sure if he admires or resents or envies them their measured partnership—or some combination of the three.

If Howard could see Tony and Pepper today, would he be pleased? Or would he take the bookful of DBT techniques for couples’ therapy on Tony's nightstand as evidence of failure?

And Mom, what would she think?

 _She'd want you to be happy,_ his brain supplies, that involuntary traitor organ, just before he falls asleep.

 

* * *

 

“The Common App is officially, uhhhh, fucking _canceled_ ,” Peter says with finality, from which Tony surmises that Peter is at his wit’s end with college applications.

“How many schools do you have left?”

“Too many. Like, ten. I’m gonna kill myself.”

“Whoa there,” says Tony.

“I didn’t mean that literally,” Peter responds. He’s hitting his keyboard a little too aggressively for a lazy Sunday afternoon, but Tony supposes there are worse things he could do. “I might scream, though.”

“Go ahead,” says Tony.

Peter considers this for a moment. “Nah,” he finally says. “Don’t have the energy for that.”

This is the longest Peter’s ever stayed with Tony. The penthouse has become the place Peter comes home to after school, or after an evening out of doors. He does his homework at the kitchen island and leaves food wrappers on the coffee table. He paces a lot and pees with the door open a couple times. He grows comfortable and gets lost in his head during meals. It is odd and wonderful to watch him; Tony is standing in a clear, cool stream whose water sparkles from the sun and looks near gelatinous, and he’s scooped up a handful of water for himself, and he’s praying it doesn’t slip through his fingers.

The kid is in his final year of high school. He’d submitted his MIT early application three weeks ago, and he’s currently neck-deep in all his other schools.

In a few months, he’ll be graduating. In a few months after that, he’ll be moving into his freshman dorm, leaving behind May, Tony, and New York to take on his own life. So now Tony wishes he’d offered to send May on more overnight trips so he could steal her nephew away for days at a time. He could have done so at any point in the past two years; he doesn’t know why he didn’t think to do so. Maybe he’d just overlooked how much it’d mattered, taking care of the kid who has made him want to be a father, which is the most headassed thing he’s ever done.

"Peter, when you go off to college," Tony says, and tamps down what's either heartburn or emotion brewing in his chest, "Don't forget to call. And come back to visit."

"What—sure," says Peter. "I'll call you, sure. As often as I can."

Truly Tony's going to have a heart attack. The kid is so earnest. _That's my_ son, he feels like saying. _That's my son._ But that's the thing—Peter isn't; he's someone else's son, and he's his own man. Tony's known him for two years and—how is that enough to stake a claim to this kid? When some kids leave home after eighteen years and only ever come back to their parents as visitors? Jesus, a scant two years of weekend hangouts gives Tony no right to call Peter his child.

"Uh, you kinda look like you're going crazy," Peter says. "You should... not do that."

"Okay," Tony agrees, and then giggles like crazy. Christ, he is not helping himself.

"Okay, maybe I'm asking too much here."

"No! No, you're not."

"Tony, you're literally _always_ like, bouncing off the walls inside your head." Peter's smiling a little bit now, but his eyes are intense as hell because that's who he is; he always takes everything deathly seriously, and that's why Tony admires him so fucking much.

"I don't want you to go," Tony admits. "In a totally selfish way. You're going to college and you're going places—you're going to build yourself something that's so goddamn amazing, Pete, and at the end of the day your life's gonna have so many shitty and beautiful things in it. Hell, it does already. I'm so fucking proud to have had a place in it. I don't want it to end—this, this weird thing where you're the closest thing to a kid I've got until Pepper pops out some kind of monster from her body and it takes over my entire fucking life and it'll be the best thing that's ever happened to me because fatherhood is Stockholm Syndrome, apparently—"

"Tony, hey, calm down—"

"—I don't want to forget what you mean to me," Tony croaks. “You said it yourself. I’m not your father. This is fragile as hell, do you know that? It's circumstantial. And when you leave, everything'll be different. We'll move on, and we'll be happy with that, what the hell. I don't like that."

"I don't like it either," Peter says, sounding very close to crying. "I don't wanna leave this—this part of my life where I'm seventeen and waiting for the rest of my life to happen. But when we get there, it'll be what we need."

Tony closes his eyes. He isn't angry, no, he's grieving. How dumb is that?

"For the record, though," Peter continues, "I’ll always need a not-dad. Whether I’m seventeen or thirty-seven with my own family. And, uh, in the absence of a good candidate, you'll do."

"Jesus Christ, you're so terrible," Tony says, and lets the tears spill over as he starts to laugh.

They fall asleep like that, facing opposite ends of the couch so that they aren’t really touching except for their feet, which are nudging each other like a litter of puppies curled up together, and when Tony wakes up, his face is sticky and he’s got a godawful cramp between his shoulder blades because he’s _old_ , which sucks. But also he’s kind of glad for it. He doesn’t have the energy to be a young man anymore—that shit’s tiring. All he wants is to take naps and tinker with his hands and be there to greet Pepper when she comes home from work, and read books (God! he sits still and reads books now) and watch children grow up. Peter looks babyish when he’s asleep, but Tony’s known him since he was fourteen and he definitely didn’t have the same amount of stubble back then that he does now, and his hands weren’t these broad-veined man’s hands then either. Tony doesn’t know how he’s only noticing just now.

At the end of the day he’s just a boring, middle-aged man who wants boring, middle-aged things, but for some reason (oh ho, isn’t it a mystery) now that he’s thinking about things he might want, his brain hands him an image of a dark-haired child who reminds him so much of Pepper, and Peter—his face both sharper and more worn—walking alongside her, looking for all his transience in Tony’s life like he belongs there.

**Author's Note:**

> Working titles for this fic included "[borat voice] my wife" and "gatordad".
> 
> About Sokovia and the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia: I think there's strong evidence that Sokovia is the in-universe version of Kosovo. The names are similar, all the street signs in Sokovia in AoU are in Serbian Cyrillic, and Stark bombs hit the Maximoff home when Wanda and Pietro were very young, which presumably matches up with Operation Allied Force. 
> 
> I found this way back in my notes after I hadn't touched this fic in months, and it really gave me the inspiration I needed to finish it:
> 
> Always the two essential questions when it comes to writing Tony Stark and Peter Parker are, "How responsible does Tony feel for Peter's actions, as well as his well-being, whether that refers to the physical or emotional?" and "What degree of emotional intimacy and/or physical involvement does this result in?"
> 
> From there you can unpack an infinite number of follow-up questions that help you define their relationship in a more in-depth way, but fundamentally those are the two questions you are answering in any fic you write about them.
> 
> Why is Peter and Tony's relationship so special? Is it the fact that they have the same understanding of so many things (responsibility, helping, defending, innovation and technology) despite having come from two wholly different lives, and in effect they have an implausibly natural understanding of each other? Does this necessarily indicate a father-son relationship? I don't think so. Most of us barely understand our fathers. Some of us resent them. Few of us have wholly healthy relationships with them. The lives of parents and children are too ingratiated for the ugly parts not to mesh together as well, to feed off each other.
> 
> I stole the joke about perceiving 14-D off a [slide](https://3wworms.tumblr.com/post/185610039682) from one of computer scientist Geoff Hinton's courses.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! You can find me on Tumblr as [3wworms](http://3wworms.tumblr.com).


End file.
